A Theory of Incentives in Regulation and Procurement or Applied Economics

A Theory of Incentives in Regulation and Procurement

Author: Jean Jacques Laffont

Honorable Mention in the category of Economics in the 1993 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.

More then just a textbook, A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation will guide economists' research on regulation for years to come. It makes a difficult and large literature of the new regulatory economics accessible to the average graduate student, while offering insights into the theoretical ideas and stratagems not available elsewhere. Based on their pathbreaking work in the application of principal-agent theory to questions of regulation, Laffont and Tirole develop a synthetic approach, with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on the regulation of natural monopolies such as military contractors, utility companies, and transportation authorities.

The book's clear and logical organization begins with an introduction that summarizes regulatory practices, recounts the history of thought that led to the emergence of the new regulatory economics, sets up the basic structure of the model, and previews the economic questions tackled in the next seventeen chapters. The structure of the model developed in the introductory chapter remains the same throughout subsequent chapters, ensuring both stability and consistency. The concluding chapter discusses important areas for future work in regulatory economics.

Each chapter opens with a discussion of the economic issues, an informal description of the applicable model, and an overview of the results and intuition. It then develops the formal analysis, including sufficient explanations for those with little trainingin information economics or game theory. Bibliographic notes provide a historical perspective of developments in the area and a description of complementary research. Detailed proofs are given of all major conclusions, making the book valuable as a source of modern research techniques. There is a large set of review problems at the end of the book.

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Applied Economics: A Critical Realist Approach

Author: Paul Downward

This intriguing new book examines and analyses the role of critical realism in economics and specifically how this line of thought can be applied to the real world. With contributions from such varying commentators as Sheila Dow, Wendy Olsen and Fred Lee, this new book is unique in its approach and will be of great interest to both economic methodologists and those involved in applied economic studies.

Table of Contents:

	List of illustrations
	List of contributors
	Acknowledgements
1	Introduction	1
2	Critical realism and economics	12
3	Conceptualizing unemployment in a period of atypical employment: a critical realist approach	27
4	Critical realism, methodology and applied economics	51
5	Critical realism and formal modelling: incompatible bedfellows?	71
6	Seeking a role for empirical analysis in critical realist explanation	89
7	Critical realism and econometrics: interaction between philosophy and Post Keynesian practice	111
8	A pragmatic alliance between critical realism and simple non-parametric statistical techniques	129
9	Triangulation, time and the social objects of econometrics	153
10	Theory foundation and the methodological foundations of Post Keynesian economics	170
11	Questionnaires in realist research: a case study of rural small-scale industry in Ghana	197
12	Critical realism and applied work in economic history: some methodological implications	220
13	Critical realism and the political economy of the Euro	233
14	Presenting demi-regularities: the case of Post Keynesian pricing	247
15	From predictive to indicative statistics: explaining corporate borrowing	266
16	Transition in Eastern Europe: critical realism and qualitative insights	279
17	Conclusion	293
	Index	302